1UP interviewed Dustin Browder to talk about Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. The Zerg and Protoss Campaigns are in concept stage, and the team is focusing mostly in the core game. They know the storyline already, know how it evolves and concludes, but for now their efforts are into building the Terran Campaign.  The Zerg and Protoss campaign are considered expansions.

Some fans have grown concern that the Zerg and Protoss won’t be playable in multiplayer. This is not true. Once you purchase the Terran Campaign: Wings of Liberty, it will have multiplayer capability through Battle.net 2.0, and all three races will be available. Once the next expansion is released, new units and content will be added.

This interview offers a few screenshots of interest. One of them shows the Terran Tech Purchase UI that allows you to buy units and upgrades once you have acquired enough resources doing mercenary jobs.

When pressing one of the units or upgrade buttons, a rendering of the unit is displayed to the bottom left. To the right you get to read stats info such as credits cost, a profile, HP, armor, special bonus attributes.

The second image contains a zoomed in view of a battlecruiser laying siege to Zerg forces. This image clearly shows an in-game cinematic as we know them in Warcraft III.  On the left we can appreciate Matt Horner (Jim Raynor’s Second in command). On the bottom, a black frame displays subtitles of what Matt Horner is saying: “Horner: Glad we made it in time, sir. Now let’s get you boys outta there.” If anything, it gives Modders an idea of how they can create their own campaigns and in-game cinematics. Hopefully we get to see more of this type of screenshots. Read the full interview.

Blizzard Quote:
1UP: Do you anticipate the production cycle for the StarCraft 2 trilogy to feel like making three separate games, or more like World of WarCraft and its expansions, where the bulk of the work is on the first installment, and subsequent ones are more about iterating and refining rather than inventing?

DB: Well that’s the hope; that a good amount of the hard work of designing gameplay mechanics and systems, as well as the internal tasks of creating tools and protocols to develop all this content, is mostly settled at this point as we get deeper into the creation of the core game. So once we ship the core game of StarCraft 2 and start delving into the expansions, we’ll have a great deal of that infrastructure under our belts and be able to concentrate primarily on content creation for the two expansion sets.

That said, we’re conscious of making sure we are providing new and compelling content for the expansions. The meta-aspects of the Zerg and Protoss campaigns, for example, will work a lot differently than how we’re doing things with the core StarCraft 2 game. It doesn’t make sense for Kerrigan to be flying around in a battlecruiser and picking out mercenary missions for cash, which is what you’ll be doing with Raynor in the core game’s campaign. So we’ll be doing something different with Kerrigan to get her to evolve and grow her Zerg army. Meanwhile, Zeratul’s Protoss campaign may require you to engage in diplomacy with the different Protoss tribes in order to gain access to different units and technologies.